Peers the Thing

As the videotape continues to whirr away, marking like grains of sand through the hourglass the prosecution’s diminishing returns from Darren Sukonick, a mind wanders to other precincts. In this case, London, where the term Disgraced Peer (DP) has been getting a bit of a workout lately, what with Lord Black on trial and Lord Archer mounting a comeback.

Archer is in rather more need than even our Conrad in that department, as he’s already been tried, convicted of perjury and served half a four-year stint as a ward of the Crown. The comeback, some years in the making, arrived in the form of a new book called The Gospel According to Judas. Therein, the DP and author of such potboilers as Kane and Abel takes a stab at, how to say, repositioning Judas’s sullied reputation. It seems he wasn’t quite the Radler, er, weasel we thought he was. The plot turns are a bit convoluted to get into here, but in Archer’s version, Judas, conveniently enough, was the victim—not the perpetrator—of a betrayal. At any rate, the book is written “with the assistance of” a mucky-muck priest with connections in the Vatican, where the Church of Rome graciously consented to hold the book launch. Nice. One wonders whether Black’s upcoming bio of Richard Nixon can touch that. Short of revealing Tricky Dick as the one true Deep Throat, I somehow doubt it.